Paris bans public meetings amid fresh rioting
PARIS, France (AFP) – The French government invoked emergency powers to ban public meetings in Paris yesterday as car-burning rioters called for “acts of violence” in the capital and youths clashed with riot police in the country’s second city Lyon.
Using emergency powers dating back to the time of the Algerian civil war, the government deployed more than 2,000 police and gendarmes in the capital after a series of internet and text messages calling for violence were intercepted.
Acting under an ordinance that banned “all meetings likely to start or fuel disorder”, police fanned out along main shopping streets and in the main railway stations.
They were inspected on the Champs-Elysees by Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, whose by now famous threat to power-hose the “rabble” in the racially-kaleidoscoped Paris suburbs helped fuel a two-week nationwide orgy of rioting.
Sarkozy was instantly recognised as he got out of his automobile on the crowded avenue, an AFP reporter said. Youths booed and yelled epithets until the minister got back in his car and drove off to inspect police reinforcements at the Saint Lazare rail station.
Paris has largely been spared the orgy of violence in suburbs around Paris and other cities, including the torching of thousands of cars and arson attacks on schools, kindergartens, gymnasiums and public buildings.
But for the first time yesterday afternoon, clashes between police and rioters erupted in the heart of a major French city, Lyon, where officers used tear-gas to disperse stone-throwing youths in the historic Place Bellecour in the city centre. At least two people were arrested, an AFP reporter said.
Despite the emergency measures, police allowed peaceful demonstrations to go ahead, and several hundred people massed close to the police headquarters in the heart of Paris to protest “discrimination” against youths in the suburbs.
“To peace, but there will never be peace in the suburbs without justice and equality,” harangued Mouloud Aounit, secretary-general of the Movement of Struggle Against Racism (MRAP).
